Trump Finds New Ways to Cheat with Golfers

"By day’s end, [at the Senior PGA Golf Tournament on a Trump owned course] even the golf itself could not fully escape associations with Mr. Trump. The winner of the tournament, Bernhard Langer, was caught a few months ago in a presidential controversy of his own, when Mr. Trump told congressional Republicans that the “very famous” golfer had confirmed to him clear evidence of voter fraud that he had witnessed while waiting in line to vote in the November election. Mr. Langer, who is a German citizen, was, in fact, in no such line, because he is ineligible to vote."

Republicans Self-Destruct Due to Idiotic Base

Thomas Friedman says that the Republican party "can't win with a base that is at war with physics, human biology, economics, and common-sense gun laws all at the same time."  Can you connect each of those disciplines with a Republican p.o.v.?  

My favorite Republican p.o.v. is the NRA's insistence that schools need "good guys" with guns to make schools safe.  Well, what kind of gun?  What kind of "good guy"?  It seems that the shooters who've massacred students and theater goers here and there were either suicidal or bent on destruction and at the very least and carrying way more firepower than what the NRA anticipates for their "good guy" who is supposed to present a deterrent.

Liberal Racism vs. Conservative Racism:

We white liberals, always opposed to racism, understand that racism is in the national water, in the air, the ether, the soil, and while we are trying to eradicate it, and clean the air and soil of it, and we've had some success, it still infects us. And so we find that we are racists struggling with our racism.  It's not intentional racism, but if it's in the polluted air we breathe and the polluted food we eat, we're bound to be a bit diseased by the pollution. 

White conservatives, the political ancestors of whom defended cultural racism and  400 years of institutionalized racism with slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, become apoplectic when it anyone even hints at the possibility of racism coursing through their healthy bodies politic.  No inoculation needed!  Their insistence of complete racial innocence is inoculation enough!  Then they point to people of color who've done some wrong to some white folks.  "That's racism!" they insist.  

The racism I harbor as a white liberal is not something unsophisticated like thinking "n____r" when I'm saying "Black" or "African-American." It's not a matter of hoping our sons and daughters don't marry "one of them."  No, my racism involves sometimes forgetting the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and acting like I earned, all by myself, every break I've ever gotten. 

A conservative doesn't typically harbor the unsophisticated racism either. They don't see a rash, so they don't see the insidiousness of the disease. So a conservative's racism involves an unwillingness to acknowledge the unearned pergs and privileges that come with being born white in the United States and an insistence that the real racism now is a indignities exhibited by people of color toward whites.  It is an unwillingness to do a damn thing about continuing racism "because, after all, laws have been passed and slavery's been over for more than a century and you better not call ME racist!"

Republican Revulsion and Obama: How Much is the Opposition to Obama Founded in Simple Racism?

Garry Wills in the Nov. 8, 2012 New York Review of Books:

[U]nder the vague general feelings about Obama—reports to pollsters that he is not quite one of us, perhaps not a citizen, not a Christian—there were radioactive centers too hot for a candidate to handle directly. He could, nonetheless, profit from their broader toxic waves, an unconfessed (sometimes, perhaps, unconscious) force. It was rightly said that a historic boundary had been crossed when a black man was elected president. That breakthrough partly escaped but did not cancel a long sad record of historic American racism. A proof that many were not willing to live with this new level of tolerance is that twice as many conservative Republicans (34 percent) now say that Obama is Muslim as the number who said it when he was elected (16 percent). The number of Republicans in general who say it is 30 percent.

That is not because more evidence has emerged in the last three years, or because the evidence has been more carefully considered. It is because a number of people are digging in their heels even more firmly against where the nation is going. As I say, there is no open racism in the Romney campaign. But it has to be fiercely concentrated on other things (like the economy) to turn its eyes from what sizzles below the surface, and sometimes not very far below.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book Obama’s America became number one on the New York Times best-seller list, and the film based on it has played in over a thousand theaters, yet its chapter on Obama’s mother revives one of the oldest racist stereotypes, that a white woman must be a slut if she has sex with a black man. A “documentary” with that same theme has been mailed to thousands of voters in key states, screened by Tea Party groups and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council. Guess which man the audience for these, and for hundreds of obscurer tracts, will vote for?

Romney, of course, does not cultivate these voters. He does not have to. He does not denounce them, either. He needs them. He cannot disown a third of his party—and those are only the hard-core Obama revulsionists. Who knows how far the penumbra of softcore revulsionism has spread among the less candid or more cautious harborers of it?

Does the Earth Notice Us?

           We think, talk, write on cave walls and on LED screens, make art, make buildings, make love without intending procreation, plant rows of food, consider our place in the scheme of things, make tools, inspire, make metaphor, walk on the moon, do something called “selflessness,” honor the “wilderness with parks,” sing, whistle, spy on electrons, harness electrons, draw, garden, play, imagine, imagine beyond imagining, laugh, and live on to laugh again when our loved ones die. 

            We’re so special.  Relative to other organisms, we are special.  Yet the earth, as an ecosystem, doesn’t even begin to privilege us over everything else.  We are not “remarkable” to the earth because the earth does not remark.   The earth has no consciousness like a whale swimming next to our boat, seemingly curious about us.

            We just wrench and muscle and gerry-rig the earth into place for our purposes.  And sometimes we fail, but not because the earth did or didn’t consider how special we are.  The earth did not place an iceberg in the way of the Titanic to teach us about hubris.  It didn’t need to.  If Oedipus teaches us anything, it’s that we learn about hubris without anyone’s help. 

            We may believe there’s a god who privileges us and won’t let the earth become uninhabitable because of our mistakes.  But even that god, at least if it’s one of the gods we study in the world’s major religions, will surely make us pay for hubris; will surely let a whole lot of us suffer and perish while the earth’s ecosystem flushes out the toxins of our foolishness.

            God or no, the earth will not die because of us. The earth will not lose its purpose if we die out. It has no purpose.  It may become uninhabitable for us.  But it will live on until the sun blows up and burns out.   No god will save us from ourselves. And the earth will take no notice of us at all. 

Philosopher Michael Sandel on the Market and Morality

From "What Isn't for Sale" in the April 2012 Atlantic Monthly:

Michael Sandel is one of the 2 or 3 leading political philosophers in the world.   Here he talks about how the fall of communism and rise of capitalism has resulted in a market based system for valuing things.  Thus, everything is for sale.

The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.

Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.

This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.

No-Man's-Land of Aging

Today, I bought a newspaper from the paper guy in the subway (BART here in the SF Bay Area).   "How's it going?" I asked as I handed over my paper and a dollar.

"Can't complain.  My old bones still strong," he stated firmly.



"I hear ya!" I replied instinctively wanting to form some sort of fleeting community with this strong older man.  

"Yeah, we done seen it all and come out unscathed and unburdened," he offered. 

"Yessir, that's true," I confirmed. 

Then he gave me a quizzical look . . . like he wasn't sure about me somehow.  A moment passed and then he asked, quietly, "How old are you?"

And I suddenly felt like a 14-year-old trying to bluff my way into some sort of after-hours party. 

"56," I said.

"I'm 83," he replied as if to confirm membership in some community that I couldn't possibly think about joining.

I slunk away with my paper and realized that I'm too old to have street cred with anyone in their 40s or younger (because 40ers think they're still 30ers) and not old enough to have any cred with the truly old, i.e., those 60 and above.  I'm in a no-man's-land of aging.

The Problem with Irony

"When I share an irony, I imply that I was once blind.  When I'm ironic, I acknowledge that I was once blind, but I don't really see beyond my former blindness; I don't see a resting place in something authentic, in something true.  And if I don't see something true, if I don't get beyond an ironic stance, then my position of 'wisdom' will be regarded ironically later."

-- I wrote this down, God knows when, but I don't know if it's attributable to someone else or I made it up myself.  I like it though.

Me? "Radical"?

Here we were, my very counter-cultural 30-something friend Sarah and I strolling near work when she asks, “How do you stay radical as you get older?”

I’m 56 and I was bemused by the question because I can’t possibly be “older” yet, but of course I am. More to the point, though, I can’t be “radical” as I understand it. Bougee? Oh, yes. But “radical”? No, I flirted with and then backed away from that route, it seems to me, about 30 years ago or more.

She pressed the point. A bit flummoxed, I babbled something about . . . . Actually, I don’t remember what I said because I was either lamely trying to live up to the compliment or more modestly insisting that I’m sort of in the world, but not fully of it, like so many of us in the Bay Area. No biggee.

A few days later, I ran into Sarah and asked, “What do you mean by ‘radical’ and what is it in me that suggests ‘radical’ to you?” She just said she knows it when she sees it; that it’s a “way of encountering the world.”

So I asked my wife. “You’re not a radical,” she said. “Look it up.” Radically, I avoid dictionaries, preferring a pretty good ear for how words are used idiomatically.

So how do we understand this word? To progressives of my generation, a “radical” was someone who plotted the overthrow of the “capitalist-pig police-state” by nearly any means necessary, only barely acknowledging that a pacifist could be within their ranks. Now, progressives don’t seem to use the term much. Where are the radicals today? Even the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to be “radical” . . . yet.

In fact, we progressives have let conservative US Americans commandeer “radical” so that now their ilk bandy it about with vigor as a pejorative, as hyperbole to discredit even the most moderate liberals. President Obama, for example, is called a “radical” by the foam-at-the-mouth crowd on the right wing. If President Obama is a radical . . . then the term has lost its meaning. Like "awesome."

Still, I have a young friend, SB, whose lovely little voice vocalizes lots of terms of endearment and some radical ideas, particularly about capitalism, war, equity, gender and pronouns. My wife and I call SB our “sweet and gentle” radical. This, of course, presumes that our impression of radicals does not generally include sweetness and light. And that would be true. I think of radicals as lean, angry types with perpetually clenched teeth, bandana’d faces protected from tear gas, necks straining as one arm flings a rock.

To borrow an insight from Russell Baker, calling  myself a radical would seem . . . immodest certainly. Like looking in the mirror and insisting I’m handsome or clever, kind to children and the elderly, or good in the sack. It’s for others to say, not me.

And sometimes those others are mistaken. Sarah sees something in me that I just can’t imagine could be called “radical.” But I appreciate her regard.

Look, I’m married -- heterosexually and even within the same ethnicity; we own a home; we are gourmands, aka, “foodies” following the trends; we read the New Yorker and watch foreign films; when we travel, it’s to Europe; I teach the children of the “1%” in a private high school with a tuition of $34k. Radical? How could it be?

The equivalent, by the way, for conservatives is “patriot,” a term they distribute willy-nilly to even the most weak-kneed privileged draft-dodgers as long as they kowtow to the rants of Lumbaugh et al. They’ve debased and stolen the term so thoroughly that I cannot imagine how it could apply to me or to, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose work sprung from a deep love of and abiding faith in this country, and from a real radicalism.

How about “counter-cultural” or even “Bohemian”? Well, sure. We lived together for 21 years before marrying and then didn’t tell anyone for 2 years; we didn’t marry until my wife’s gay brother and his partner could do so; the home we own was, we’re told, “built by hippies” high in the Oakland hills; we don’t eat in chain restaurants and we buy organic; we drive Priuses; I teach “Nature Writing” among other subjects and my Econ class begins with a poem about work each day; we both believe we’ve escaped the South and can’t imagine living anywhere other than the SF Bay Area; a great outing is a hike in Pt. Reyes. Yeah, I’m a stereotype, but not a radical.

We have young friends who may be radical. We love them. Wouldn’t turn ‘em over to the police. Would bail them out if it comes to that. But me? Radical? Me? Only if the term is neutered. Or commodified.

I find it amusing that Sarah and I enjoyed our conversation while strolling on Haight St. -- the Coney Island, the Fisherman’s Wharf, the tawdry Disneyland of commodified radicalism. Had I looked around me I might have said, “Sure, compared to this commodified radicalism banking on 60’s wannabe fetishism, I am surely more radical.” Had I thought of it, I would have thrust my bag of Haight Market purchased Blue Bottle coffee beans into the air, thus letting my 2012 freak flag fly.

Chill vs. Frenetic Doctors

A former student of mine is now a first-year medical student trying hard to maintain a balanced life.  How?  By not giving into a "study frenzy."    This is a good idea!

Study frenzy makes people frenetic which is not a good temperament for a doctor.  I like my doc to be chill. 


Doc: "Greg, dude, gotta bust out the running shoes now and then.  Ya feel me?" 

Me: "Yeah, Doc." 

Doc: "You know, like, dia-freakin'-betes, du'.  Not cool.  Die early and shit." 

Me: "Yeah, thanks for the heads-up . . .  for like the gazillionth time, Doc." 

Doc: "Yo, chill.  I'm just sayin'."

Me:  "S'cool.  I know you got my back." 

Doc:  "Speakin' of getting your back.  Time for the old man checkup."


Instead, it might have gone like this:

Doctor:  Mr. Monfils, you're risking diabetes if you don't exercise strenuously 45 minutes, at least!, each day.

Me:  Yes, I know, Doctor.  I recall your warning last year.

Doctor:  And the warning still applies . . . except, of course, I offer it with greater urgency as you continue to age.

Me:  Thanks, Doctor.

Doctor:  No need to thank me.  Now, drop your trousers and turn around so I can check for prostrate cancer.   Still eating red meat?


You see, that's a doctor who was frenzied in med school.  Fortunately, I'm not easily frightened.  Perhaps I should be.   But a chill doc would be more successful getting me to exercise.  Mos def. 

So to my former student I say, "Chill" and be a humane, sensitive doctor not a harbinger of doom.

(My actual doctor . . . is great!)  

Rock n' Roll in the Dough

The essays of the great rock critic Ellen Willis are available in a new collection entitled Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Here's a particularly insightful assessment, written from the fabled Woodstock concert, of rock as a commodity and not a revolution:

"What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from a commercial exploitation of the blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be—and has been—criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. Nor is the hip lifestyle inherently radical. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can’t be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution. In the meantime, we should at least insist that the capitalists who produce rock concerts charge reasonable prices for reasonable service."

A Magazine is an iPad That Doesn't Work

Here is a video of a one-year-old who can't get a magazine to react to her touch the way an iPad does. 


What does this portend?  It's obvious to me.  And I don't mind it.  Books will become ornaments, but too limited to actually "read" . . . because the reading, as the term is already understood, will be limited and physically clumsy.

I'm going to fly to Europe this summer and while I've always so looked forward to taking those two or three books with me -- not only because of my choice of authors, but also because of the physicality, the tactile sensation of "settling in" with a book --  I will, nonethless, on this trip take an iPad with a those two or three books, and the New Yorker, and a film or two, in it.  


And just in case there are tech glitches, I'll take a book, real book, with me.  And I'll find out where in Paris I can buy English language books.  Just in case mind you. 


Interested in more musings of a 56-year-old teacher confronting and welcoming technology?  See here.

Emails to David 3: Digital Tools and This Teacher

Dear David:

I have a great deal of hard copy resources, in my veteran teacher cupboards, and a great deal of resources stored digitally, mostly in bookmarks and in digital copies of hard copy material. [All photos . . . come from a few keystrokes with Google. So . . . they are NOT my office.]

About 12 years ago, my internet access sped up at the school then employing me. And suddenly, I could access so much stuff of use to me as I prepared classes or just to enhance my scholarship. So I did access it. And I saved stuff digitally, but mostly I printed the material and put the material in 3-ring binders.

Very quickly, I found myself overwhelmed and, frankly, anxious about how much stuff there is "that I must read!"

I quickly noted that the Law of Diminishing Returns had kicked in and I hadn't really noticed. In other words, I had been teaching my classes well, introducing good stuff, changing the curriculum formally and ad hoc, etc. And I had been doing this partially because I had kept orderly . . . cupboards, cupboards which I culled nearly every summer.

I note that a cupboard can only hold so much stuff. The area may not be an ideal space for storing material in that it may be too big or too small. The space was given me and arbitrarily so. But the space is limited and so it does compel me to revisit and reassess material.


Digitally storing? The Cloud is nearly infinite and so I fear I could become more acquisitive and, thus, less discriminating and less thoughtful. I hoard as if hoarding alone increases my scholarship. Moreover, I spend more time with my face in my laptop. Sure, a book is just another technology to convey symbols, but my cupboards and shelves and my library and my desk and my reading chair and my bedstand and my favorite cafe and my dining table and my sofa require somehow more human interactions with material. But this may not seem sensible to 14 year old.

And, I know, it's the human who makes a book or a bedstand human. I'll humanize whatever tech you throw at me. In the future, some child might say, "You could only carry one book at a time and they could be kinda' heavy?!!? It's inhuman!"

The future beckons and it's not beckoning on paper.

g

Faith

Wonderful high school kids conducted a forum about faith during lunch for three days. Here's my reaction to what I heard:

Believing in a transcendence, a deity, something supernatural . . . requires faith. Faith is what we use when we have no rational reason to expect something. Hebrews 11:1 "Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." So says the Good Book. When the existence of something is wholly irrational, and therefore there is no rational evidence in support of its existence, then "faith . . . is the evidence." A god that can be rationally proven . . . is not a god.

I'm told that atheists use "faith," too, whenever we "park the car and expect it to be in the same place later." But that's not faith. It's rational to expect my car to be where I parked it: I don't need faith for this. When I expect my car to be where it's parked, I don't need and can't use faith that it's there. I have a rational expectation that's it's there. If it's not there, then there's a rational explanation: It was taken or towed or I mis-remember where I parked it. So, no, that's not where this atheist's faith lies.

I'm told that "it's a miracle when I wake up every day." But that's absolutely NOT a miracle. It's to be expected. It's rational and natural. Even for me at 56.

Faith is reserved for what we cannot rationally expect.

There's nothing rational about the existence of the transcendent and nothing rational about believing in it. The whole enterprise is irrational. But that's what makes faith remarkable: We believe despite all the rational world's rational evidence to the contrary. We believe despite the absurdity of it. Jesus: "I am in this world, but not of it." Kierkegaard tells us we must take a "leap of faith." We leap from the rational, over the abyss, to the irrational.


And when we find some other people who believe much the way we do, we congregate with them and start a religion. Or join in one already existing. How could we not? How could we keep this revelation to ourselves, a revelation so grand and absurd, and not share it with others who are similarly ecstatic or confused?

Faith is purer than religion. Faith is one person's commitment to the absurd. All it is is a devotion in heart and mind.

Religion is the human enterprise of bringing the faithful together and thus it is more flawed and fraught. At first, it's a celebration of like-hearted people. Then all too often they force the faithful to toe some line and all hell breaks loose.

Yet, it seems to me, faith as a human enterprise has to be a social enterprise. Unfortunately, it's the congregating that makes it less pure sometimes. Other times, we all see the light. . . together.

Faith should never be conflated with religion. But we do need to congregate with like-hearted people. Just need to avoid the hubris. The Southern Protestant churches I grew up in were all about the holier-than-thou hubris. I took what little faith I had and hid it away from the blowhards in those churches. Big smiles . . . followed by lots of talk of Hell.



I say "we" above, but I'm an atheist and relatively new to my atheism. Actually, perhaps I'm not an atheist. I just don't care if there's a god. If there IS a god, that being doesn't seem to care about us. And if I'm right, then what kind of god is that? Given whatever god there MAY be, what's the point? This god may as well NOT exist. We pray to God for a better relationship with a brother. Why SHOULD god answer that prayer? God or no god, it's OUR responsibility. You may say that the act of praying may help us sort out what we need to do. Well, that praying is also called quiet contemplation.

I do believe in things being greater than the sum of their parts. But not supernaturally so. I am moved by the Bluegrass and African-American Gospel traditions, by Hank Williams singing hymns, by Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday." I recognize that these beauties are an expression of faith. But for me, it's the glory of human expressiveness, not the spirit entering a soul. And this glory of human expressiveness is plenty for me.

I'm fascinated by faith as one of the gloriously human engagements with all things mysterious, with the great Mystery, with the absurd. And while mine never fired up whatever kindling there was in me (though there was an effort back in my 20s), I know also that when people discuss their waning faith with me, I don't tell them to join me on the dark side. I help them and encourage them to rekindle, to find, the faith they think they're losing.

Faith Music: The Substance of Songs Hoped For

I was asked by a magazine to create a CD mix informed by the theme of "Religion" and to write about the mix.


The Substance of Songs Hoped For

Every Sunday, every goddamn Sunday, off to a modest Presbyterian church for white folks like us, where the religious music was desiccated, and faith – an unpalatable medicine, a cure-all we were forced to swallow lest we die and go to hell. This faith did not assure us of eternal contentment so much as it provided bragging rights allowing the faithful to strut around with an “I got mine, you get yours” attitude toward backsliders. It did not uplift even though uplift was demanded of us. Certainly, the music wasn’t meant to uplift, and so it spilled from our mouths like exhalations of bad air. “Why are we singing?” We were certainly not making a joyful noise unto the Lord. The lyrics promised triumph and glory in God’s fold, but our singing, our inhibited, but so earnest singing – even when we’d turned to the rare, felicitous melody – resulted in astringent hymns. Paradise could not, absolutely not, be so tedious; God, not so grim, flinty.

And that’s why I’m an atheist. Because of the goddamn music.


Alright, actually, people, if anything will bring this lost lamb into the fold it will be African-American and Bluegrass gospel music. At a Catholic school in which I formerly taught, I created a Gospel Choir of teens and faculty of all backgrounds. We opened for Maya Angelou once, got invited into African-American churches in East Palo Alto, and rocked the Mass at school. If you don’t feel some spirit move you while singing and swaying amidst the hallelujahs and hollers, and it turns out there is a heaven, well, you ain’t goin’. Hell’d do you some good: at least you’ll feel something!

Bluegrass gospel evokes an ecstasy, too, but unlike African-American gospel, bluegrass compels me to sit perfectly still, shivering.

And while I’m certainly drawn to other music inspired by faith, you won’t find it here. I love it, but . . . no cantors, no Indian ragas, no Persian devotional music, nothing from the European classical tradition, no Rastafarians, no Tibetan chanting, no Gregorian chants, no “Christian rock” (as the term is, and forever must be, an oxymoron). No, here you have black and white gospel, mostly from the 50s or inspired by that era (see the Sounds of Blackness who open the CD), with a few oddities and musical commentaries thrown in: There’s the great multiple Tony award winner Audra McDonald pondering an abortion decision as she writes to her boyfriend in “Come to Jesus,” a lovely melody and lyric by Richard Rodgers’ grandson Adam Guettel, who sings with Audra here, too. Mahalia Jackson sings Duke Ellington’s great devotional piece “Come Sunday” with Ellington and his orchestra. Jamaica’s Jimmy Cliff sings “Many Rivers to Cross,” a Judeo-Christian motif if ever there was one and the song always sounded so devotional to me. The extraordinary and extraordinarily overlooked Percy Mayfield prays to God for Peace on Earth and “if it’s not asking too much, please send me someone to love.”

Then, I get gutsy: I provide the jazz singer Nina Simone’s brief, otherworldly, and, generally considered, definitive version of “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” and I follow it with Elvis Presley’s version in which he lays off the histrionics and sings beautifully, devotionally and, I like to think, well enough to honor and impress Nina. See what YOU think (insofar as I believe deeply in the pre-Army Elvis). We hear Elvis again inspired by the many great gospel groups here from the 50s: the Fairfield Four, the Swan Silvertones, the Pilgrim Travelers (with a young Lou Rawls), the Soul Stirrers (featuring a young Sam Cooke), and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, with Pops Staples on the guitar, who are heard here in a production of “The Gospel at Colonus,” which is the Oedipus Trilogy presented in the African-American gospel tradition. Speaking of Pops Staples, he and his daughters are here with their weird, haunting, black country gospel.

The Sounds of Blackness add a brief traditional slave lament, “Ah Been ‘Buked,” in response to which the ethereal voice of Alison Krauss sings yet another startlingly lovely melody, this time on the theme of theodicy. But at least three artists aren’t having it: Randy Newman, a Jew and an atheist who has no truck with the “all will be revealed” nonsense of theodicy, caustically ridicules faith in “God’s Song.” Post-Beatles John Lennon is more gently dismissive in “God.” And Hayes Carll has lost his partyin’ girlfriend to Jesus and if he ever finds Jesus, he’s gonna “kick in his ass.” After all, “I’ll bet he’s a commie . . . or even worse yet a Jew.”

Finally, three songs of surrendering to faith, converting: There’s Hank Williams (Senior . . . accept no substitutes except maybe his grandson) seeing the light in one of the greatest white country hymns, John Prine with some extreme backwoods white country accapella, and for fun, a lot of fun, we’re near heaven with the penultimate offering, Stubby Kaye giving up craps and joining the Salvation Army in “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” from “Guys and Dolls.”

Then, as promised, heaven: I ended it all with Aretha affirming faith . . . joyously. How can we resist this? Come on up to the altar with me now. Come right here and proclaim your faith in . . . the power of faith to give us all this beauty.